The personal remains political - and vice-versa

For the last few days I have been considering starting another blog, This is because I have felt the need to rant about major political issues. And in these rants, I feared that I would be wandering very far from the “spiritual”. The use of inverted commas is deliberate, simply because I cannot differentiate between spiritual and secular realms. When people are starving, or dying through preventable disease or when armies kill, rape, torture and loot their way through terrorised populations, then it is impossible for me to differentiate between the secular and the sacred. Maybe this is a fault. Certainly I have been told so many times that I should not focus on the negatives but should look at flowers and birds. For it is there where Goddess is,

And they are right. It is, partly through contact with flowers and birds that I have stayed alive to the age of 61 and not succumbed to despair. Even more importantly however, there are those who have loved me, far more than my deserving. They know who they are – as I do – and I cannot name them here. But, however, I am aware that my survival thus far is not solely the result of my actions or virtues but has chiefly depended on the deep love and support that I have received. And was often incapable of returning in the unconditional way it was given.

And the uncomfortable truth is that some of those who offered that love in the past are now dead. And their deaths are directly due to the actions and decisions of others who decided to declare an absurd and unwinnable war on drugs. So, can I withdraw into some pink fluffy la-la land with the reassurance that their deaths are their own responsibility and part of their karmic journey and those people who made the decisions that led to the circumstances in which they died bear no responsibility? I am responsible for the consequences of my own decisions only insofar as I am conscious that I have any choice. As a member of a global elite - a western educated, middle class male – I have considerably more free will than the huge bulk of the population of the planet. To that extent, I bear considerably more responsibility for the way my life has developed – for good or ill – than they do.

What responsibility, however, does the orphaned African child who has inherited her mother’s HIV bear? Or the parents in Georgia over the last few days who have tried to shelter their children from Russian bombs? Or Iraqis? Afghans? Or the people of New Orleans who waited for basic food and water for well over a week in the superdome in a major city in the most powerful and richest nation on the planet? How do they bear responsibility for their plight? The short answer is, they don’t. The hell they inhabit has been inflicted by others in pursuit of the extension of their power and wealth.

I have often been accused of being too angry. I do not know how it is possible not to feel anger at what happens in the world. Anger is the only appropriate response, I would have thought. Human beings are beautiful and sacred and the planet that we inhabit is wonderful and sacred. That is the basis of my belief. All that is, is Goddess. And yet, we are divided and out of harmony and are thus – as a species – pathologically destructive. This state of mind is called, for want of a better word, patriarchy. How, why and when this disease was born, I am not qualified to say although I have a few ideas. This does not matter, however. It is like spending time with a patient with lung cancer trying to determine whether it was through her smoking as a younger woman, her partner’s smoking, car exhausts, faulty genes, some unidentified virus or plain bad luck. In the end, the patient will die unless some intervention is made fairly quickly.

What we are seeing in the world today is the progress of a potentially fatal disease the major symptom of which is that entire categories of human beings are considered dispensable. It is also a world in which, overwhelmingly, divinity is envisioned as male. Absurdly, the birthing of the universe is seen as the function of a male in some sort of cosmic and narcissistic masturbation. The very notion is fundamentally insane. It is therefore unsurprising that the systems of thought that it has spawned are equally insane.

And I do not believe that any are immune from this insanity. Patriarchal thinking has infected all discourse. Any healing however, will not come from some New Age wishful thinking but from a realisation that perhaps the patriarch resides within us all and manifests each time we presume to know what is right for another.

some thoughts on masculinity

When we were setting up the Goddess Temple in Glastonbury there were numerous occasions when men would stop me in the street and ask me questions – or rather make demands. These would invariably boil down to “Why aren’t you including the god?” To which there was only one answer, which was, “Because it’s a Goddess Tempe. If you want a temple that includes the god, set it up yourself. Nobody is stopping you.” They would talk of balance – that goddess and god reflect the forces of the universe – yin and yang, Siva/Sakti etc. Or it would become Jungian and anima/animus would enter the conversation. However it developed, the conversation would seem to have a sub-text that the exclusion of the male god was a direct insult to them as men. It was as if they felt that I, as a man, was some sort of traitor to my sex. I had gone over to the enemy.


I was reminded of this in a one of the comments to a recent AlterNet article on the de-criminalisation of prostitution. The writer was writing in response to a previous comment in which he felt the woman writer had been disparaging to men by putting quotation marks around such phrases as “male needs”. He then went on to speak about the failure of feminism to address such issues as the unhealthiness of our society’s attitude to sexuality – seeming to imply that there was too much focus on “male-bashing”. While I agreed with many of the other points he raised, I could not agree with him here. In my experience, the desire for a healthy sexuality has been a major focus of feminism from my first exposure to in the late 60s. Of course, what that healthy sexuality might look like has been a question of much, and often heated, dispute.

The protagonists in this debate have been overwhelmingly female and as such were only able to look at male sexuality, particularly heterosexuality, from the outside. And from, literally, the receiving end. All they could see was how men behaved. And they then described this. They described the effects of men’s behaviour on their lives and the lives of other women. They asked that that these things changed. Men, sensing attack, closed ranks in order to resist this. This defensive reaction took various forms. First, there was an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle and turn the clock back to the 1950s. Then, there was what in Britain is called “laddism” – a sort of permanent infantilism built around sport, beer and “men behaving badly” and indulged in this by feisty, but ultimately supportive women. Finally, there was the “Iron John” phenomenon – which gave a sort of intellectual and “spiritual” gloss to laddism. This latter was particularly insidious because while posing as a new way to masculinity it was reaffirming and re-inscribing the gender division of patriarchy. When I first looked at this phenomenon, I was reminded forcibly of what I had seen of my father and his friends in their Rugby Club. Male bonding rituals were nothing new – I had witnessed them as a young child. And I saw then, although of course it seemed natural at the time, how such bonding depended on having a woman to stand and watch them, provide the sandwiches, then , at 8 or 9 o’clock to take the children home to a chorus of “Goodnight Ladies”. Then the serious business of drinking – and, well, sometimes, I’ve heard, there might have been a stripper - began.

I was therefore never tempted to bond in the woods. Although I love being there with others and I like both drumming and hugging. I did not want to look for a new masculinity in the mythology, which had served patriarchy for millennia. It is the fruit of the poison tree.
I am very reluctant, therefore, to enshrine any “god” before we have seriously investigated whether this god merely re-inscribes, in of course appropriately non-sexist language, the old gender stereotypes. Why would I want to? The vast bulk of human experience is, I believe, non-gender specific. We are all born, we all eat, excrete, sleep, we all want comfort, intimacy, shelter, security. We all face death and disease, bereavement and loss. We have, it is to be hoped, our moments of triumph and joy. There is, however, the one unbridgeable gap – reproduction. There is nothing important that I can do that a woman can’t. This cannot be said in reverse and here is the taproot of male insecurity. All we can do is watch as the woman’s belly swells, stand by as the new life emerges and then gaze as the child suckles. Here, my only response can be wonder and awe. Sometimes there is a element of fear and resentment there as well – a sense of exclusion from the really important business of life. The only male blood mystery is combat – I remember my father’s best friend, who was also our GP, saying that a particular rugby match had been very bad because “there was no blood”.

The new masculinity must, therefore, take account of this one major difference and look honestly at our own feelings about it. To the extent that we can never feel a child growing within us, can never give birth and never suckle – although there has been some research, I believe, into the latter – biology is destiny. Freud had it the wrong way round – men’s womb envy is biologically determined whereas the privilege given to the penis is cultural. However we define masculinity, it will not help to insist that a male god is honoured in a goddess temple or that feminism takes account of our sensitivities and women censor what they say from their own experience